Skip to main content

(Signal) Boost This Post (Ft. T-Mobile Again)




Yep, this happened. Refer back to Towers of Power Ft. T-Mobile. To recap: This is the fruits of my father’s effort, and the fruits of mine were getting our signals refreshed to the tower and reestablishing connectivity. That's part of the reason I'm even posting this, because there's no cost to actually use our T-Mo hotspot on our phones. It's pretty fast!

I'm not a shill, I swear.

This is a 4G LTE signal booster. There are two pieces - a Window Unit, and a Coverage Unit.

It comes with a few instruction booklets. I notice once says “You must register your device with your wireless provider and have your provider’s consent.”

Well, they sent it to me. I hope they know I have it. My first thought was actually “I haven’t had Xfinity for three weeks, how am I supposed to do that?” Before I remember context clues.





There are two pieces of paper. One is the start guide, I won't bother photographing it because that's what this post is for!

The other is this yellow page;



 “We sent this to your house. If this isn’t the house you’re using it at, or you move, tell us so we can adjust the settings.”

It’s basically a range extender. So, where is the best place for it to be? First, let me explain the layout of our home




Omitted for security.

So this house is very large. That’s what you get when you live in the middle of nowhere.

There are cable connectors in every room except the office, bathrooms, and kitchens, and as we went from AT&T’s telephone line to Xfinity using cable for our internet, we had to find the only cable port that was unused - The one in my room, because I don’t have a television there. Just doing my part to kill the cable industry. 

The signal doesn’t reach to the front of the house with the PC and other laptops, so we got an extender and now it does, and all of that to say - This is an extender for a cell signal.

Back to the quick start guide; There’s tiny text that says “You have to return this if you terminate your service."

The window unit;


Note the “Uh, this might mess up or give inaccurate information to 911 if you call while in use.” label.

Step one; Find the location with the most bars.

After walking around my house, such options include
  • The middle of the hallway not near any windows.
  • A place nowhere near any power outlets,
  • A spot in the kitchen also not near any windows.
I place it near the front. The Window box has to be a certain distance away from the booster.


Both boxes came with these stands, as well as power cables. I couldn't figure out how to get this on until I saw a bag of screws. Then I still couldn't. 

The booster is placed in the Living Room -



Higher numbers indicate the house is bigger. Smaller domiciles would have smaller numbers.

As the signal was already fairly good after the towers and our connection was reset, When this entire debacle is over, I'm just going to pack it up and send it back, or maybe just hang onto it for when we get our next house.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making KPI Dashboards with PowerBI

 While this is the free tier, I cannot share or collaborate with others, nor can I publish content to other people's workspaces, but they will not stop me from screenshooting and recording these self-taught adventures,so! I'm doing this because I idly searched "Mattel careers" and "Information Technology", and seeing a bulletpoint saying the following: Analytical and reporting skills such as creating dashboards and establishing KPIs such as experience with PowerBI, Cognos, Tableau, and Google Data Lake/AWS is preferred And thought "Well, I've used Tableau, and I've heard about PowerBI,  even if its in-demandness is questionable , so how similar is it? And can I write about it?"  First, PowerBI (PIB) does have a downloadable, local version, but apparently Windows-only. I could download the .exe but I couldn't run it / drag it to applications on my MacBook.  Not a problem, we'll use the online SaaS version, and a dataset found here, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

 If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return.   In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.
Post a Comment
Read more